Wednesday, 29 April 2015

[Here, for your comments and reactions and to help me get back into it, is the current draft of the opening to my book of the Transformations of the Year 600 - or whatever I decide to call it in the end. As with other recent posts, it was mostly written over a year ago]

Spectres stalked western Europe
in the decades around 600. The Western
Roman Empire was dead. In the last
decades of the sixth century surely no one could any longer be in any doubt
about that. The last legitimate western
emperor had been murdered in 480 but, even so, the body of the pars occidentis (Western Part) had
remained, like a body that no one was quite sure had breathed its last. For a good half-century, western European
politics had carried on as though the Western Empire still lived, encircling
its still-warm carcass as though it might at any moment sit back up. At certain times it seemed that someone –
Theoderic the Ostrogoth or Clovis the Frank – might yet even be able to breathe
life back into its lungs.

But the most obvious attempt to
do so – by the eastern Emperor Justinian – had put it beyond doubt that the
West was no more. It was an ex-Empire.
It had ceased to be. It is difficult to
see how things could be otherwise. After
all, Justinian’s had self-consciously been an attempt not to revive a comatose
body but to reanimate a corpse. It had
begun by pronouncing the Western Empire dead and specifying the cause of
death. It had, said Justinian, been
murdered and, indeed, the murderers were the very people who at that moment
were wondering whether there remained any life in the old body, the ‘barbarian’
kings of the West. Justinian’s ultimate
failure to bring the Western Empire back to life as a territory directly
administered by an emperor left ’Rome’ as something that henceforth could have
only a spectral existence in the West.
It had lived and it had died; it might return but only as a ghost. And that not yet. In the century or so after the traumas of the
Western Empire’s death agony in Justinian’s wars, it seems that Rome was simply
dead. And gone.

There was, however, another, much
more important ghostly presence haunting Western Europe around 600, the
ultimate revenant expected any time soon: the Messiah, Christ himself. The demise of the Western Empire was but one
of a number of signs and portents that seemed to announce the Second
Coming. For several hundred years,
Christians had lived with the idea that the Roman Empire was commensurate with
the Sixth Age of the World. Had Christ
not been born during the reign of the Empire’s founder, Augustus? Now that the Empire no longer existed, surely
now was the time for the Kingdom of Christ to come.

In the writings of the period
there is a very clear sense of living in time ‘out of joint’. The present is a fleeting, spectral moment
which no one can grasp, an ever moving threshold between what is coming and
what has gone. For those alive around
600, it was as though that fleeting moment had opened up to encompass a whole
epoch out of time. Events were seen not
as elements in a continuous sequential narrative or chain but as reappearances
of stories told in the scriptures.
Individuals and actions stood as repetitions of types. The characters of the Old Testament, in
spirit, walked the earth again. In a
time out of time cause and effect stood not in relation to contingency or as
responses to previous events, not – in other words – in a linear, horizontal
sequence but in a vertical relationship between man and God. Any action had its forerunner in the tales of
the Bible and its consequence could be seen accordingly as direct punishment or
reward. This, after all, was a world in
which the not only the tombs of the saints but also their relics operated as
timeless points of contact between the earthly and the celestial. Holy men did not live particular lives but
shared, said one contemporary, a single life,
regardless of time or place. In this
world the past had gone and yet endured.
Figures long dead inhabited the actions of living men and women. All deeds and all persons could be seen as
further reapparitions of these ghostly forerunners. But as time seemed to stand still all
appeared to herald a future long predicted, an end of worldly time. The world of 600 was haunted by spectres of
the remote past and by the expectation of a messianic future.

One might even get a sense of
this by leaving the world of the learned men, churchmen most often, who
narrated, insofar as they could
narrate, this ghostly time out of joint – or perhaps within the joint of past
and future – and entered (where better?) the cemeteries wherein ordinary folk
laid their kin to (as they hoped) rest.
Here too there was a sense of timelessness – perhaps there always is in
graveyards. The rites for the dead were
transient, leaving little by way of visible monument. Across much of western Europe north of the
Loire, the dead were interred in a ritual that was played out for an audience,
often seemingly a large audience of local people, that conveyed much about the
deceased and his or her family and how they wished to be seen. That involved gift-giving and feasting among
the living and dead and the corpse was accompanied into the tomb by objects
deemed appropriate. It is these and the
skeletal remains of the dead that permit an insight into society at a local
level, such as frequently eludes the attention of the authors of the written
sources. The deposition of grave-goods
was, however, governed by rules, albeit ones which changed in detail at least
from one area to another. Those rules or
norms determined what sorts and numbers of objects were appropriate for people
of a particular age and sex. The effect
of this ritual was frequently to telescope the time that had lapsed between
this and the last interment of a person of the same category. This surely worked in a way to normalise
quite abnormal and traumatic events, reassuring the bereaved but at the same
time the very sameness of time, the taking of the specific out of the normal
temporal sequence, meant the haunting of the ceremony by the ghosts of
previously departed people of the same age and sex. In many ways the funerals of north-western
Europe operated in a fashion that was as typological as the writings of
hagiographers and theologians.

And yet, although there was a
clear similarity between the thinking of these people at quite different
levels, which surely emanated in some way from their shared milieu, there were
important differences. The transience of
community ritual in the earlier sixth century, which finds parallels in rites
and ceremonies unconnected with death and mourning, appears to originate in the
world of uncertainty that surrounded the first death of the Western Roman
Empire. Had the Empire gone, or
not? The fifth-century crisis had
undermined centuries-old social hierarchies in the provinces north of the Loire. Social and economic stress and competition
meant that a position in local society was likely to be transient, within a
lifetime and could be projected into the future, from one generation to the
next, only with difficulty. The funerary
rites just mentioned were one means by which people attempted to deal with the
crises in local society which death brought about. The future was uncertain and there seemed
little point in investing in it. An
irony came in that, around the end of the sixth century this fluidity of social
structure in the former provinces of the north-west (and beyond the former limes too) was beginning to settle down
into a more stable social organisation.
One might begin to project a family’s status into the future with some
confidence. Yet, especially if one took part in the sorts of Christian
commemoration that were becoming fashionable among a newly-emerging
aristocracy, one might well do so in the knowledge that such a future might be
very short. The idea of permanence might
be tempered by an awareness that the days of tribulation were upon us. Or nearly so.

These developments themselves
raised ghosts. An élite only just
establishing itself, whether as a noble caste in some areas, or as a royal one,
perhaps, in others felt the want of a direct pedigree. Again the typological, the vertical link to
God, would stand in for the linear, the sequential or the horizontal. And so, again, the spirits of the biblical
past came to possess the living.

The apocalypse was expected, and
soon, but quite when no one knew. In
this strangely still time, out of time, the present was part of the past and
part of the future, part – indeed – of the end.
The horizon formed by that end was, therefore, not fixed. It remained open, fleeting, moved towards, a
future that was ever-present, spectral in itself. It was with a gaze fixed upon that ghostly
open horizon that the people of western Europe passed from the Roman world and
into that which, with the passage of centuries, would come to be called the
medieval.

Sunday, 26 April 2015

If you check out the BBC History Magazine 'special edition' on Medieval Life, which is surprisingly good, featuring articles mostly by actual eminent medievalists (Arnold, Hatcher, Rawcliffe, Ormrod, Hudson, Carpenter, Barron, Bovey...), if also one by Dan Snow, you will find that the last word goes to 'Historian Guy Halsall' in a little comment piece that I am quite pleased with - even if I most certainly *don't* say that "our medieval ancestors helped shape today's world", as is claimed on the contents page (or at least I don't think that's what I say, but perhaps it is further proof that, as ever, Derrida was right and nothing has a stable meaning...).

Monday, 20 April 2015

[Here is the next installment of the chapter. As last time, it was mostly written a year ago. It is very much a draft and most if not all of the 'facts' mentioned still need to be double checked!]

There are other arguments
presented for limiting the time and place of relevant history. These can be illustrated by a series of
different examples. Some of these are
taken from John Tosh’s interesting and valuable Why History Matters. I
disagree quite seriously with the line that Tosh takes but I am profoundly
sympathetic to his overall project and certainly find myself in the same
general part of the political spectrum. In
other words, I think he is firmly ‘on the side of the angels’. My disagreement concerns the argument he has
chosen to make in defence of the discipline and its value, which I think is
mistaken in that I hope to demonstrate, that there are better, stronger
arguments available to serve his purpose.

One argument for the relevance of
history in the present is that it helps us understand current situations in the
world. The middle east, Iraq or
Afghanistan furnish potential examples but so too do the ‘troubles’ in Northern
Ireland or the conflicts in the Balkans after the fragmentation of Tito’s
Yugoslavia. Here the argument goes that
if one knows about the historical ‘chain of events’ in the area under
discussion, then one will gain a better understanding of the problems in the
present. The situation in the Balkans –
the tension between different ethnic groups – is to be understood as the
product of a particular series of events. Again, though, this argument for
relevance presents numerous problems in its implications about the nature and
purpose of historical enquiry. The
problems should by now be familiar. The
current state of affairs is assumed to be the automatic, logical outcome of
preceding events. That, in turn, implies
some problematic assumptions about the objectivity of historical narrative and
about causation, which we have already discussed. The narratives used to explain or justify
current political action are no less chosen,
no less artificial, than the ones employed to explain ‘who we are and how we
got here’. Those alluded to by
politicians in modern conflicts are often no more constructed – even if they
frequently are less empirically accurate.
Our modern nationalists are not operating under compulsion from the
Past. As I have already argued, the Past has no power; it’s dead and gone. It cannot even be properly conceived of
without the deliberate construction of narrative, and all the problems that
that entails. It cannot make you do anything. These modern politicians and their followers
are, like the people involved in the Northumbrian Feud or the hypothetical
diarist of Chapter 2, choosing events from their understanding of the past to
justify what they are doing or what they want to do in the present.

Here the argument for ‘relevance’
shifts ground to claim that historical study enables us to challenge the
‘abuse’ of history for political ends.
We can stop to think more closely about the underlying implications of
this argument. Obviously it should be
stated at the outset that this argument is motivated by the best of
intentions. The problems occur in the
nature of history that is assumed. The implication is, firstly, that history is first and foremost about the
collection of empirical facts. This happened like this; that did not happen, or did not happen like that. That is, as I have been at pains to argue,
not only a pretty low level of intellectual expectation for an academic
discipline; it is fundamentally not what history is about, as opposed to
chronicling and antiquarianism. The
second point follows from this and is that this argument for ‘relevance’
assumes that there is a single, univocal object history that is capable of
being abused. The only level of abuse
that can reasonably be encompassed within the argument is the telling or
presentation of falsehoods. A
questionable, if factually reliable, reading of history, based upon the
available data, cannot easily be called an abuse without implying that there is
a finite array of acceptable, non-abusive interpretations. The argument may then move to discuss the
motivation for such presentations of history, claiming that using history for
political purposes is abusive. It
assumes, therefore, that history is capable of being written without some
element of the political, broadly defined, entering into the process. Or it supposes that there is a range of
acceptable non-abusive motivations for historical writing: the simple neutral disinterested furtherance of knowledge for example. Even if this were possible it could only
function at fundamentally non-historical levels of antiquarianism and
chronicling. Then we might reasonably ask what this deployment of erudite, accurate, factual history (itself non-political?
non-abusive?) might practically achieve.
What, for example, might be attained by pointing out the factual flaws
in nationalist historical narratives?

Let’s look at the problem more
closely. We can again draw some examples from modern trouble-spots where
nationalism rears its invariably ugly head.
Let’s take, for example, a modern Ulster Unionist or Irish Republican,
or a Serbian nationalist (or a nationalist from any other area). Does a
knowledge of the history of Serbia or Ireland help us understand his actions
(let’s assume it’s a he)? No it doesn’t. For one thing, we’ll soon discover
that the ‘history’ that he uses to justify his case or actions is cock-eyed and
wrong. Does it help just to know the
events he makes reference to, that he keeps harping on about – the Battle of
Kosovo Pole or the Battle of Boyne, say? Does it help to know that in reality
King Billy’s army was paid for by the Pope, or alternatively that Cromwell’s
troops killed rather more English soldiers than Irish civilians at the sacks of
Drogheda and Wexford? Does it help to know that for most of their history Serbs
and Croats and Bosnians rubbed along together in their communities just fine
(think about it; if they hadn’t, ‘ethnic cleansing’ wouldn’t have been
‘necessary’)? Does it help, when confronted by Greek nationalism (as
represented by the neo-Nazis of ‘Golden Dawn’ for instance), to know that in
the 1830s 80% of Athens spoke Albanian? That the reason that (allegedly)
Socrates could still read a Greek newspaper if he came back to life is not the
allegedly millennia-long continuity of Hellenic culture and language but that
Greek was reinvented on more classical lines, and purged of Slavic and Turkish
words in the late 19th century (as was Romanian, which is the only reason why
it is as close as Italian is to Latin)? Would it avail you much to point out to
a Scottish nationalist that the Declaration of Arbroath was copied from an
earlier Irish letter and that (contrary to the impression one would get from
visiting the battlefield memorial) it post-dated the Battle of
Bannockburn? No. All of these things might get you punched in
the face, or worse, but would not help you to understand why.

Obviously, a simple and entirely
valid advantage is conferred by the collection of accurate historical information and that is the ability to see through the truth claims of others
when these are based around an appeal to history. The counter-arguments provided might be ‘true’,
in that they are based upon empirically-demonstrable historical ‘facts’. Yet, they carry little practical weight. Although such factual correction might
influence third parties and, with luck, cut the ground from beneath some
propaganda, it is unlikely to change anyone’s mind. Frequently the result will simply be to entrench the idea further that some vague power is controlling and distorting
‘the truth’ in order to further their oppression. As Slavoj Žižek has repeatedly argued, using
the psychoanalytical concepts of Jacques Lacan, empirical arguments rarely cut
any ice in such discussions because the root of the problem does not lie in the
register of the Symbolic (crudely, the factual; that which can straightforwardly
be represented in language) but rather in that of the Imaginary (the
ideal/idealised).[This last bit needs re-doing.]

A more positive impact might be
to make political parties eschew any reference at all to the past. This, one must admit, need not be a bad thing. It might, especially, be no bad thing if it
ended cheap demagogic appeals to a supposed national historical heritage (see
above). One might see an example of the
cutting away of the grounds for such an appeal in the cross-party response to
the British National Party’s employment of a picture of a Spitfire in its 2008
election leaflets. It was rapidly
pointed out that, such was the party leadership’s ignorance, they had picked a
photograph of a Spitfire flown by a Free Polish pilot. Indeed one could say that, rather than (as
intended) symbolising the Battle of Britain as a fight against encroachment by
foreigners, their picture actually illustrated the historical benefits of
immigrant eastern European asylum-seekers taking ‘British’ jobs! Had the ‘historical’ argument been developed,
it might have undermined all future use of Churchill, the Battle of Britain and
the Second World War by the xenophobic right – if the point had been made more
forcefully that most of the Conservative Party in 1940 was in favour of a
negotiated peace with Hitler, that Churchill’s biggest supporters in the ‘dark
days’ of 1940 were members of the Labour Party and that certainly by the end of
1940 the war had ceased to be a national conflict and taken on some features of
a ‘crusade’ for the liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny – in other words for
an engagement and involvement with Europe, not isolation from it. None of this would have been without value.

Within this line of argument, it
is clear, modern history does indeed normally have a prior claim to
‘relevance’; arguments against xenophobic nationalism that are based on the English
‘nation’s’ formation through the migration into Britain of Anglo-Saxons,
Vikings and Normans are, though not without use, easily enough dismissed as referring
to something that happened ‘a long time ago’ or that was somehow
‘different’. The longer ago that something
happened, the less use one can make of it in discussing modern politics. This is usually the case, but not always; the
end of the Roman Empire, allegedly at the hands of invading foreign immigrants or
because of supposed moral degeneracy is frequently deployed by right-wing
commentators as a ‘lesson from the past’.

Nonetheless, as mentioned the key
drawback with these arguments is its reduction of historical activity to simple
chronicling; historical ‘truth’ means factual accuracy. Wherever a claim cannot be refuted on
straightforward factual grounds, as the element of interpretation involved
becomes greater the value of historical argument to modern politics incrementally
lessens. When academic opinion is
divided (no matter how unevenly matched the sides in the debate), politicians
have repeatedly been able to bat away objections produced by professional
expertise with a sort of relativist line that it represents ‘only one opinion’
(as for example even with the reality of climate change). One could claim, and legitimately enough (see
chapter 1), that a formal historical education – or at least the existence of a
class of historical professionals – is unnecessary for the furnishing of this
level of historical argument. Non-academic
writers about the past could fulfil the need for factual data every bit as well
as ‘professionals’.

Another weakness of the
traditional line about the value of historical knowledge is that it is frequently
somewhat essentialist. Specific types of
people placed in a particular context are likely to behave in the same (or
similar) ways to those observable in the past.
Thus the key flaw in John Tosh’s argument that historical awareness
might have led to an avoidance of the (at best ill-advised) invasion of Iraq in
2003. A knowledge of the problems and
parallels that could be extracted, interestingly enough, from the study of the
British occupation of Mesopotamia in the 1920s not only represents, at the
level of historical endeavour, the simple accumulation of facts (chronicling,
again), as just discussed. It also – if,
to take a hypothetical counter-factual situation, wherein historians are called
in to advise the leaders of Britain and the USA in spring 2003, deployed as a
warning – makes the implicit assumption
that the inhabitants of the region would behave in just the same way as they
had done eighty years previously. It is
not difficult to see how easily such arguments could have been refuted,
logically and indeed reasonably, by a president and a prime minister already
bent on launching the invasion. The
argument that things ‘were different’ after the First World War is reasonable
enough; so would be an accusation of a form of essentialist orientalism on the
part of the historical advisers. So? These things happened in the past. If one moved on – as the true historian (as
opposed to the chronicler) must surely move on – from the cataloguing of
verifiable events to their explanation,
one would soon find oneself in the midst of discussions of the precise context
for the events following the First World War and the break-up of the Ottoman
Empire. Discussion of this context would
rapidly differentiate the recorded events of the 1920s from the likely
consequences of actions in the 2000s, unless, that is, one did assume a set of timeless Arab attitudes, grounded in a view of
the Muslim culture or tribal structures of the area as fixed and unchanging. Such a view, it would correctly be pointed
out, would deny the people of Iraq any capacity to act as independent historical
agents or to make their own choices. Once
these assumptions were (rightly) exposed and questioned, the ‘relevance’ of the
historical knowledge to the present would be seriously compromised. These arguments against the war could
furthermore be deflected in slightly different, if all-too-familiar, less
confrontational fashion by thanking the historian-advisors for their input and suggesting
that the historical knowledge they had provided would help avoid the repetition
of similar mistakes…

Wednesday, 15 April 2015

[I have, you might have noticed, been rather creatively 'blocked' for the past few months. I am trying to get myself back into writing, especially my book Why History Doesn't Matter, of which I have posted draft elements in the past. To try and help in the process here is part of a chapter I have just recommenced working on (chapter 4), with the same title as this post. This section was largely written about a year ago. As ever, all (constructive and polite!) comments, criticisms and suggestions are welcome.]

Thus far my argument has been
composed of elements which are quite familiar within discussions of historical
practice. Yet, it is has also become
clear that these apparent commonplaces have had little effect either upon how history
continues to be written or upon how historical study is justified. Indeed, it would seem that the implications
of the points made have either not been followed up carefully or have been
ignored as inconvenient. This chapter
pursues the exploration of this crucial disjunction.

We have seen in chapter 1 that
history us more than the simple chronicling or description of past events or
facts. Chapter 2 demonstrated that the
narratives of the past are artificial constructions that were rarely if ever experienced
in the way recounted. Chapter 3
developed this point to argue that, therefore, the story of the past does not
tell us who we are and how we got here.
All this cannot but have a serious and detrimental effect upon the usual
arguments for the relevance (or otherwise) of history. Obviously, this matters. People ignorant of the subject often claim
that History is irrelevant. Their claim
is far from justifiable but the usual defences of the relevance of historical
study are, on the whole, equally weak.
That weakness means that those who wish to deny the importance of an
historical education can easily bypass them.
The form that such defences take is profoundly damaging to the
discipline of history itself.

What kinds of history, in what
periods or places in history, are relevant and to whom? And why?
The usually-deployed arguments for historical relevance have a tendency
to valorise some forms of history (usually modern, often very modern; sometimes
specific regions or historical themes) over others (ancient and medieval, or
unfashionable thematic areas like diplomatic history). The problem is that, especially when combined
with the academic politics to which I will return, this can lead to an
ever-increasing concentration on ever narrower themes and time-spans. One might say that this need not matter;
that, although breadth of knowledge or awareness never did any historian any
harm, the simple knowledge of a wide range of things that happened in the past
is in itself fundamentally unimportant to the value of historical study. That argument has some logical force. However, range and diversity in historical
endeavour need defending on different grounds from those usually employed. If it is properly carried out, all historical study is of equal value
and relevance (albeit in different ways from those usually proposed), whether
one studies Hitler or the Hittites. No
period or topic has a greater claim to being more relevant than any other. According to the criteria by which historical
relevance is normally accorded, though, no
history is actually relevant at all.
Judging history according to the usually-assumed criteria of relevance
is a mistake; it perpetuates a myth.

Part of the problem with
traditional justifications for history originates in the acceptance, castigated
in the previous chapters, of the idea that each episode in a historical
narrative finds its necessary and sufficient cause in those that precede
it. Using the metaphor of the snooker
balls [A crib from Bertrand Russell, IIRC [actually Hume and billiard balls - with thanks to a Mr Danny Chaplin]: you can observe a sequence of events
but not causation itself or whether the results are determined by intention: I hadn't actually written this bit up when I wrote this about a year ago and I stll haven't! So I can't remember quite what I had in mind!] we
saw that this is a very poor way of envisaging historical cause and
effect. If this argument is accepted,
then a critical weakness is exposed in the claim that, to understand how things
are here and now we need to comprehend things that happened, here, immediately
beforehand. But, even if this critique
is not accepted, one is left with the problem of how far back ‘relevant’
history goes. If the events of 1945-2015 can
only be understood in by reference to those since, say, 1939-45 then surely the
events of 1939-45 can themselves only be comprehended by reference to those of
1914-39, which in turn can only be grasped via study of the period 1870-1914,
and those events make sense solely in the light of history between 1815 and
1870. And so on, back to the earth
cooling.

The only means of escaping this
bind come through the simple exercise of academic power. Most historians are specialists in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries and so have a vested interest in staffing
their departments with ever more specialists in ever narrower and more specialised
areas of modern history. Once a critical
mass is attained, the dynamics of university departmental politics make it
increasingly difficult to change this situation. As more members of staff offer increasing
numbers of modern options then, logically inevitably, more students take modern
history. This fact is then read après
coup to argue that modern history is what most students want. When a particular era dominates school
curricula and when the burden of fees and debt understandably reduces an undergraduate
intake’s confidence in trying out new periods and places of history, the two
points merge and a sort of cock-eyed market principle comes into play to
underline departmental politics. We must
give our student-customers what they want.
As pre-modern history becomes more marginal, specialist staff are called
upon to teach ever longer and broader stretches of history, usually well beyond
their detailed knowledge. This in turn
underlines the idea among students and specialists in later eras that nothing
much of importance changed or happened across these millennia and thus that a
single lecturer can reasonably be charged with covering the entire period
between the fall of Rome (or, in the States, ancient Sumer) and the Italian
Renaissance. And so the log-rolling
continues apace.

I have witnessed these dynamics
in action with modern historians but the attitude is contingent; it is not
intrinsic to modern history. Historians
of other times and places are equally capable, when in positions of dominance,
of justifying their own prejudices with high-sounding principles and using them
to entrench their current superiority. I
have also experienced much the same dynamics in other institutions among
medievalists and have seen traces of it among classicists and early modernists
too. This is well attested in the US as
well as the UK. Nor is this sort of
academic politicking confined to history.
It is visible across many other disciplines. Witness changes in subject matter and
coverage in modern language departments, again frequently to the detriment of
the earlier periods taught, or the witch-hunt against continental thought in
British philosophy departments. The
point is that what is presented as logical, natural or automatic is usually the
product of specific, local operations of power.
Indeed I will be arguing that teaching and learning this point is one of
the most important purposes of history.
Thus the arbitrary cut-off points used to determine when history ceases
to be relevant are part of a battery of tactical ruses within the petty
departmental politics of the university, not something that would emerge from
serious historiographical theory.

One can isolate similar
contingent political principles used to justify the arguments in favour of the
history of a specific region being more ‘relevant’ than that of another. Here, the pressures usually – though sadly
not always – come from outside academia.
Typically they originate with politicians of a conservative bent who
wish to present a particular national narrative to the schoolchildren of their
country. This has been a much-debated
issue in the United Kingdom for some time but it is by no means limited to, or
especially extreme within, British politics.
French history has been subject to analogous pressures and the political
demands made of US public schools by conservative state governments are often
much more disturbing. The idea that one
particular narrative is natural or represents ‘the truth’ is highly questionable. Such narratives, as we have seen, are
artificial constructs designed to make a particular point. A key issue is the arbitrary selection of the
geographical zone in question. In the
British example, the determination of a particular off-shore archipelago might
reasonably be seen as a solid enough justification for the geographical
delineation of a long-term historical narrative. Of course, it is never so simple. It is a commonplace that ‘British history’
all too often means ‘English history’, with Scots, Welsh and Irish playing only
walk-on parts or, as I once put it, walked-on parts. What is England or Scotland or Wales in a
long-term context? All these are
specific units of the earth’s surface with no natural connection and, perhaps
as a result, no very long-term social or political unity. England has existed, as currently defined
geographically, for under 1000 years and yet is, by that definition, the oldest
of the four British polities by some margin.
Even then, the precise delineation of the Anglo-Scottish border was only
fixed in its western reaches after the Union of the Crowns in 1603. As far as Berwick upon Tweed is concerned,
the issue has been debatable even longer.
Although Berwick is currently located administratively in England,
Berwick Rangers play their football in Scotland. Scotland only acquired the isles at various
points in the later Middle Ages. Wales never had a unitary existence before
English conquest and administration except, conceptually and inversely, as that
part of southern Great Britain which was not ruled by an English king or
kings. Ireland has never been
politically unified, and certainly was not before the Anglo-Norman landing in
1166. All these points render
questionable the idea that the history of these regions should naturally or
automatically be relevant to all those who currently live within them. And that leaves aside the even thornier issue
of whether all those people who currently occupy these zones constitute any
kind of unitary ‘nation’ in any case.
The issue, obviously, is not limited to the British Isles. Exactly the same points could be made,
usually with even greater reason, in more or less any other country of the
globe. The issues of the relationship
between history and modern identity will resurface later. [In a chapter entitled '"We are not "them"; "they" were never "us"']

The only way to combat these
points would be to use the history of the regions to question the usual assumptions, to show the historical disparity of
the people who come to occupy England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland today, to
show the fortuitous, accidental un-natural
means by which these portions of territory or space have been thrown together
as political units. This might, one
could reasonably argue, have a relevance to the modern population of a
particular country. At the same time,
though, a couple of other points would be implicit. One would be that the usual presuppositions
according to which a regional history would automatically be more relevant to
its modern population than the history of another area would be
undermined. The assumptions according to
which the inhabitants of a geographical area naturally constituted a nation with
a shared history would be – in the correct
sense of the word – deconstructed.
Crucially, the value of history would be displaced, from the
transmission of narratives of ‘who we are and how we got here’ to the critical
questioning of claims to be able to say either who ‘we’ are or how ‘we’ got
here. The lesson would be quite the
opposite of that which is usually claimed as relevant. History would rather be concerned with how
‘we’ could have got somewhere else and how what ‘we’ mean by ‘we’ (and thus,
implicitly, ‘them’) changed constantly through time. ‘We’ have not always existed. The exercise would be one of critically
thinking through how the past is presented and manipulated.